5
Change Starts at the Top
Here we are forced to examine our attitudes about everything, including our dogs. We are constantly challenged to become more open to the language dogs use to communicate with us.
—The Art of Raising a Puppy
Part of the fascination of working with dogs is that we are always learning new things, becoming more attuned to dogs’ true nature. Working with dogs is anything but static. For example, over the years we have honed our view of training. There was a time when we emphasized the repetitive character of obedience, drilling dogs on the basics over and over again. Our axiom was “more is better,” and while dogs left our program knowing their obedience exercises cold, we also observed a certain overload, a saturation, a subtle disconnect in the relationship between owner and dog. Our methods needed to evolve to foster a more effective transition into daily life beyond the monastery. By listening to what we observed in the training process, we came to understand that, to a certain degree, less is more, and we began to approach our training process from that vantage. We don’t mean to say that we gave any less application to training. We just tried to pay more attention to the dog’s emotional state. Over the years, we have seen how this approach has borne fruit. It has aided us in helping countless dogs reach their potential, and has made us better human beings in the process. Changing our minds has meant always being open to learning more, to adopting an attitude of humility, the basic characteristic of the true student. We believe there is no limit to what a human can achieve by being present and spiritually aware. The wonder is, the same can be said for the dog.
Maybe the best way to begin to understand your dog is through what we call inseeing. This is not some New Age concept cooked up by unrealistic monks. Instead, it’s based on a genuine understanding of how dogs think and on our experience of listening to and reading a dog’s reactions. There are a number of enlightening books that describe the ways that dogs communicate with their bodies, including Brenda Aloff’s photographic guide Canine Body Language: Interpreting the Native Language of the Domestic Dog and Turid Rugaas’s On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals. Armed with this knowledge, and by patiently and faithfully studying the behavior, body language, and ways of communication among dogs, we have become increasingly attuned to what dogs are actually “saying” in the various contexts of daily life. As we have garnered our own experience, more than thirty years working with dogs, our knowledge has grown exponentially. As the founding Monks of New Skete did when they immersed themselves in the athenaeum of dogs, we encourage you to read all you can to build your own foundation of canine knowledge.
If you do, you will find that, since their earliest ancestors, dogs have understood social order and collaborative hunting. A well-ordered pack of wolves can successfully hunt, shelter, raise offspring, and pass on their genes. A pack suffering from disorganization and social strife will not have clear leadership or collaboration, and will eventually die.
Dogs know this on a genetic level. It is why a properly socialized dog is conscious of how to communicate with other dogs using their species’ unique and understandable body language. As dog trainers, we have learned to read dogs, recognizing attitude and thoughts and, yes, even emotions by interpreting body language. And that is precisely what allows us to influence dog behavior, using our own body language to clearly show a dog what we want from him. Some call it dog whispering. Whatever you call it, understanding dogs and helping them understand and abide by sensible rules will make both you and your dog happier.
We describe inseeing as the ability to get inside your dog’s head, to see the world as it sees the world. We at New Skete have an advantage in this sense, perhaps. Surrounded by German shepherds, and by the natural beauty of our setting, we get to observe our dogs living as they were intended to. For instance, a mother disciplining her pups out on the lawn, or an older female shepherd teaching a five-month-old pup the dynamics of hierarchy, is in the true nature of being a dog. One of the hallmarks of a contemplative approach to life is learning to pay attention to life’s beauty and complexity manifested in the most ordinary of circumstances.
Brother Thomas, who was the driving force behind New Skete’s training program, had this insight into inseeing: “Learning the value of silence is learning to listen to, instead of screaming at, reality: opening your mind enough to find what the end of someone else’s sentence sounds like, or listening to a dog until you discover what is needed instead of imposing yourself in the name of training.”
BROTHER CHRISTOPHER I came to the community years after Brother Thomas had died, and did so without any plan to be involved with dogs. Although I knew that the community bred German shepherds and trained dogs of all breeds, my reason for coming to New Skete was to be a monk. It was the overtly spiritual and monastic part of our religious life that initially attracted me. It’s not that I didn’t like dogs. I loved them. Had them all my life. I was happy that dogs were around. I just didn’t come to the monastery because of them. My friendship with the dogs developed organically as I worked with them every day.
Novices at the monastery are expected to get involved in a lot of different things, not just in one particular area. When I arrived, I was tasked with practical chores such as mowing the lawn or shoveling snow, cleaning kennels, doing housework. I would also, on occasion, help Brother Job, who had taken over the training program when Brother Thomas died. Things changed quickly for me when Brother Job departed the monastery abruptly in 1982, leaving behind a kennel filled with dogs. That evening we had a meeting. It was Father Laurence, then the abbot, who asked if there was anyone willing to volunteer to take over for Brother Job. As I was the only one who was in a position to do this (all of the other monks were busy with other work), all eyes in the room turned to me. I said I’d be willing to try. For the first eight months, all I did was live, breathe, and sleep dog. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t want to feel only a step or two ahead of my clients.
Funny how things happen, though: Through that immersion process I had an experience similar to Brother Thomas’s. I discovered, over time, that I was actually very good at training dogs. I had a sort of natural gift and the dogs responded well to me. More important, I was becoming aware of the deeper dimension of our work here. At first, I was too busy learning how to train the dogs to notice it. But as I had the opportunity to work with more and more dogs, I began to feel comfortable. The dogs became my teachers. It was from this perspective that I could make the poet Rilke’s concept of inseeing my own. By witnessing the various ways dogs communicate, and by learning to read how subtly they sometimes use their bodies in this regard, I began to appreciate the human-dog relationship on a more intuitive level. I became conscious of what the dogs were really looking for in the relationship—leadership and guidance—and my ability to provide it. This affected not only the relationships I had with my own dogs but also the way I trained. Increasingly, training blended technique with attention to the dog’s emotional state.
The good news is you don’t have to be a monk to relate to your dog in a way that transcends the species boundary. Listening to your dog takes practice and commitment, yes, but the payoff can be extraordinary. Once we begin to understand dogs beyond what we comprehend by just human communication, our relationship intensifies, our enchantment with them increases, and as it does our understanding of them grows. The more we learn about dogs, the more we know about ourselves. Dogs are absolutely guileless and effortlessly reflect back to us our own emotional temperature, how we are coming across to the world. It is vital that we pay attention to how dogs address us through their body language because it increases our self-knowledge and our ability to interact peacefully with life.
Like rungs on a ladder, with each step we climb higher and see more clearly.
From a practical standpoint, inseeing simply increases your potential to teach and your dog’s potential to learn, and it does so dramatically. What begins perhaps as just appreciation gains the depth of insight and knowledge of your dog’s true nature. The more sensitive you become to the ways of canine communication, the better able you’ll be to respond empathically to what they actually want and need. With practice, an unspoken communication begins. In this beautiful stillness, we bridge the gap between species and we’re able to experience a relationship of mutuality and trust, one that borders on true friendship.
Dogs are drawn together to play. If they seem to understand each other, it’s because they usually do.
Dogs speak to us all the time. With a practiced eye, you’ll begin to see the subtle changes in your dog’s eyes, spanning a spectrum of emotions from joy to fear to curiosity to boredom. You’ll begin to understand the positioning of your dog’s tail and ears, what she’s telling you when she reaches with her paws. You’ll know what she’s saying by how she carries herself and by her gait as she approaches you. Learning to understand what your dog is telling you is the greatest gift you can give her.
The Challenge
Once we learn to listen to our dogs in the language they speak, their world opens up to us. The first lesson is to understand that you’re a human and your dog is a dog. Sounds ridiculous, right? But this sacred communication begins as simply as that. When owners get lesson one wrong, bad behavior follows. For instance, one of the most frequent observations we hear from clients about their dogs’ naughty behavior involves the human projection of motives onto the dog. Recently, a client with a Brittany spaniel was explaining one of her dog’s occasional house-training accidents. “He absolutely knew he had done wrong,” she said. “He was irritated that I left him when I went to the store, and so he left a huge pile right in the middle of the living room! I could see it written all over his body. He took one look at me and he slithered away.”
As we’ve often said, dogs live in the present. The Brittany spaniel wasn’t feeling guilty about something he had done a half hour before. What the owner saw was the dog’s reaction to her disgust at encountering the pile in the living room. When we suggested to our client that the dog was simply interpreting her body language and responding instantaneously to it, she didn’t want to believe it. She felt more comfortable attributing human motives to her dog’s behavior than honoring the dog’s ability to read her body language in a flash. From such a perspective, the dog merited punishment. But even if the owner made the spaniel look at “what he’d done”—or pushed his snout into the pile, which sadly still happens often enough—the dog would not understand why he was being punished.
Dogs are not moral creatures in the way human beings are. They do not commit sins deliberately, as humans are capable of doing. A dog does not possess the psychological mechanics needed for revenge. Scientific experiments conducted in recent years show conclusively that dogs respond with their bodies to cues they pick up from their owners. When an owner projects guilt onto the dog, the owner is being grossly unfair and setting the dog up for real confusion or worse.
“He won’t listen to me!” is a refrain we hear over and over. Remember, though, there are always two sides to communication with your dog. Instead of trying to force your dog to understand you, why not try to understand your dog? The ultimate goal is that hallowed middle ground—the shared voice that both dog and owner understand.
Well-behaved dogs can accompany their owners on adventures. Kate Hartson’s beloved Ella loved to carry enormous sticks.
So what is your dog asking for? Companionship, stability—not the roller coaster of emotions some owners offer them—and simply to move his body. Dogs are quadrupeds, after all, and are designed to move. Dogs are adaptable, of course, but they’re still members of the animal kingdom, and their natural habitat is not a city apartment or a fenced-in backyard. Consigning a dog to the sounds of Dr. Phil or Judge Judy on a television, or walking your dog only until she eliminates, is a form of slow torture. Dogs need to sniff peemail and listen to nature. They need to explore and run. Yet, for so many millennia, they have thrown their lot in with us.
For the Love of Man
A dog’s faithfulness can override even her instinct. Why do dogs need us so much that we can profoundly affect their behavior and happiness? Dogs care about what we want from them because, when led properly by the human, they consider us to be more than their pack mates. We provide more than food, shelter, and comfort. In an analogous way, we provide dogs with a sense of meaning, comfort, and purpose. Your dog’s faith in you becomes its reason for living.
Dogs do not simply love us. They worship us from the foot of our beds, from the end of a leash. You can see the adoration in a dog’s eyes, and the longing she has for you as you touch her. What’s interesting is what this devotion provokes in us: not arrogant domination but a desire to give our dogs the best that we are capable of, our best selves.
Trained dogs submit and yield to this worship readily. It satisfies them on a level that humans, with our questioning mentalities, may not fully comprehend. The loyalty of a dog, particularly a trained dog, is absolute. He never questions or has a crisis of faith. He doesn’t believe. He knows.
Over and over, we have noticed that after putting a dog through even a basic course of obedience, the dog begins to change behavior that wasn’t even addressed in the training. If you do your work keenly, the dog gives up undesirable behaviors without even being commanded.
Dogs know that owners don’t like bad behavior. We don’t keep it a secret! We grouse and yell at them all the time. What’s more, dogs don’t want to engage in bad behavior.
When a dog is trained and led by a compassionate authority figure, she naturally begins to look at her humans in a new way. She learns that she is not giving up freedom but gaining a helping partner. She no longer has to make every decision for her life. It’s not satisfying to a dog to pull on the leash and be out of control. Yet if that behavior is all she knows, she’ll do it over and over. To us, that behavior is a cry for help, the way the dog shows her profound need for leadership. Once the dog has learned to yield her decision-making to a human, a bond between dog and handler is formed that knows no limits of depth.
So why do dogs care about what we want? Why are they willing to do what we ask of them if we can show them clearly what we want? Why will they yield their willpower to ours?
They do it for the love of human beings. They do it because they love us more than they love themselves. They do it because they live as if they are existing among their gods who domesticated and, yes, in some sense created them. We don’t mean this in an egotistical way, but rather as a reflection of pack animal science and an indication of the level of devotion dogs hold for us—and the responsibility we have to them because of that devotion.
Is it genetic? The gene succeeds so the gene continues? Probably. But we think it’s more than that. We think the dog has a void that only humans can fill. Even those of us who succeed the most with dogs can’t love them as profoundly as they love us. We can’t. Because we don’t need from dogs what they need from us. But we can understand and honor the dog’s need for leadership. We can bring a dog to a place where his need for us is paramount yet doesn’t destabilize the independent nature of his being.
The ultimate reward is a bond during the dog’s lifetime that exceeds any other comfort he can ever know and that fills us in a wondrous way. Dogs have the innate ability to see the best parts of us. Imagine if we actually believed them! The bond we can form with our dogs helps us to be better people. Through a dog’s love and devotion, it becomes easier to find your way through life both because you have a companion for the journey and because your companion has an endless supply of faith that you’re following the right path.
MARC My father’s parents kept a succession of black English cockers for as long as I can remember. They were all named Taffy. In those days, a dog’s life truly was an adventure. The current Taffy would be let out for a morning potty that sometimes lasted until lunchtime.
My grandparents lived in what was then rural West Chester, Pennsylvania, today a center of technology and an exurb of Philadelphia. In my childhood, the town was known best for the Teachers College, a few shops—including my grandfather’s furniture store—and miles of cornfields.
Taffy I or Taffy II might run outside for a quick pee and then scratch at the back door to be let in for breakfast. But he might just as easily scamper through the backyard to the end of the street, where the nearby cornfield stretched endlessly. In late summer, the corn was taller than me. My then four-year-old sister and two-and three-year-old cousins still remember how I formed them into my own merry pack. I was six years old and already the pack leader! Without telling the adults, we followed Taffy’s route deep into the corn. I became lost almost instantly, since I lacked Taffy’s nose and sense of direction. All the rows blended together, and my little-girl pack began to cry. Then we heard the panicky voices of mothers and grandmother calling from far off. Following the sound, and merry no longer, we eventually emerged teary-eyed and drippy-nosed to face the music. As the oldest and self-nominated pack leader, I rightly caught the blame, but in just moments, relief washed over the adults and all was forgiven.
Taffy, on the other hand, never got in trouble over his forays into that field. He was just a dog, following every instinct he possessed to quarter the ground, locate birds and small prey, flush and pounce. Those little cockers never hunted alongside humans because my family didn’t hunt. But they hunted nearly every day, for their own pleasure, and very happily indeed.
The funny thing is that none of the Taffys was ever trained to do anything. Yet none of them ran away from home for longer than it took to canvass the neighborhood. None of them ate the furniture. No self-respecting Taffy would ever steal a roast, poop in the house, or bark like a maniac for no reason. They had too much dignity, these dogs. They were allowed to be proper dogs, doing proper dog jobs.
Mind you, we weren’t politically correct then. Little did we know that one day we’d neuter all our dogs and fence them in rather than let them run free. Although we now know it is important to be responsible pet owners, we have done so in a way that has left our friends frustrated and unemployed. Back in West Chester during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, most people didn’t assign their dog a job. They didn’t have to. Dogs ran loose often enough to find their own employment, gainful or otherwise. Taffy chose to hunt rabbits and birds. The terriers terrorized mice and rats in the field. And the German shepherds barked at intruders, real or imagined. But if a shepherd made the mistake of biting the mailman, that dog’s owner might spend a month driving every day to the post office to pick up his mail. Inevitably, that dog would find himself on a chain, unemployed and frustrated. Today, most dogs feel just like that German shepherd, without a job, lacking purpose, and, worst of all, wanting freedom.
Next door to my grandparents lived a family who had a huge fenced yard. Eventually a German shepherd appeared, kept behind the fence. Then there were two, and ultimately three or four.
I could never keep track of those dogs because they all looked alike, and they all barked viciously at the sight of any human other than their owners. My grandfather named them Fang. Each of them individually was known as Fang, and as a family, he called them the Fangsers.
The Fangsers never got to roam. In fact, they never left their yard. I simply assumed they were vicious and followed my grandfather’s advice never to look directly at them when coming or going. That kept them as settled as possible. Now I realize that the Fangsers were most likely intelligent and active dogs consigned to a life of boredom and frustration. The only job they could assign themselves was to become hyper guardians of their domain, and this is what they did. Unlike the Taffys, the Fangsers were never able to engage in healthy doglike activities. So they substituted viciousness to fill in the gaping holes in their collective psyche.
My mother’s family were not dog people. From them I learned appreciation for art but nothing about dogs. To them, keeping animals in the house was an alien idea. Eventually, my father prevailed upon my mother to permit a dog in our home. I believe he must have used Cézanne’s breed as an inducement, because this little dog was a miniature poodle, much different from the hardy hunting Taffys his parents owned.
Cézanne drove my mother crazy. From the first day this little curly apricot bundle entered the house, he adopted her as the one he loved above all others. It’s a strange thing about my mother: Animals gravitate to her. She has learned to tolerate it, but she’s still prone to recoil slightly at their approach. Dogs often avoid those who appear uncomfortable with them, or they may even take advantage. Yet they don’t come to my mother aggressively. I have noted many times that dogs seem bent on seducing her affection. Not many have succeeded.
Sadly, little Cézanne was among those destined to fail. If Mother went to the bathroom, the puppy left us and followed her to scratch at the door. When she sat, he only wanted to sit on her lap. If she tied her shoes, his tongue got caught in the knot. Cézanne went back to the breeder, and for several years I kept a small chew toy bearing his tooth marks.
I was no more than seven when the puppy came to us, and only a few weeks older when Cézanne went away. I was not the object of his adoration. But he left a mark on me anyway, and I longed for a puppy of my own. Many children want a puppy, but my dream seemed as impossible as wanting a pony or a baby elephant.
Perhaps it was destiny for me to feel this longing. According to the Chinese calendar, my father was born in the Year of the Dog, as was I. Father loved his dogs then as he does now: passionately and, possibly, with a small touch of insanity.
My parents divorced when I was nine years old.
And because my mother felt bad for me, I was to have a dog. The year was 1969. Lassie was queen of television. At the time, I didn’t know Lassie was really king of TV, played by a series of male collies. I did know Lassie was beautiful, noble, intelligent, loving, and loyal.
Mother was not buying into the collie concept. She reminded me that our car was a Volkswagen Beetle, and that with herself, me, and my sister, a grown collie wouldn’t fit in the car. She suggested a Shetland sheepdog, telling me they looked much like a small collie. Shelties were not well known in those days, but I was not about to look a gift dog in the mouth. I remember being concerned that the delicately negotiated deal might implode, so I readily assented.
We visited a breeder who showed me several puppies, none quite to my liking. Then she brought out my puppy. From the first second my eyes put that puppy into my brain, I knew he was my dog. At the age of eleven, I’m not sure I had ever known anything as a certainty in quite this way. But I was positive.
My mother had wisely decided to wait in another room while this process took place. The breeder explained to me that the puppy was too young to leave his mother. I would have to wait a few weeks to bring him home.
Today, many people get their puppies at six weeks, and sometimes as early as five weeks, after birth. I now believe there is great value in allowing a puppy to spend those critical extra weeks in the company of his mother and littermates. As he grows within the family unit, a puppy learns many social skills from a good mother.
If he plays too roughly with her, or should he nip her hard, the mother will quickly and fairly discipline the puppy so he understands the limitations placed on his behavior. Similarly, if he should become too rowdy with his brothers and sisters, nipping one of them with too much pressure, the littermate will yip and refuse to play for a few moments. Thus, the puppy acquires social skills by learning to inhibit some of his impulses. Some of those puppies that leave the litter too early find it difficult to adapt their behavior to suit their owner’s expectations.
It turns out that impulse control is the most critical part of training your dog. After all, most owners ask trainers to help them stop behaviors such as jumping, nipping, and running away. Solving all these problems requires a dog to stem his own impulse to do something other than what his first instinct tells him to do.
Leaving my new puppy in his home for another few weeks should have been hard for me. But it was not. The deal was struck, and for the moment, that was enough. I don’t remember anything about the time I had to wait. It must have passed in a blur. I suppose that as time passes, we have room to store only the most significant details. I named my puppy Gus, and he lived nearly eighteen years. He lived with me, my sister, and my mother until I went to college. Then he lived with my father and stepmother, at whose house I spent time with him often, until his passing.
When Gus first came to me, he followed me everywhere just like a baby duckling follows his mother. I didn’t train him, and I rarely even used a leash. Gus followed me, and he came every time I called him. Little did I know that most baby dogs seem to understand their vulnerability to predators and stick close to their mothers. I thought Gus was obedient, and I didn’t give it a thought.
But when Gus turned five months old, it was time for my dog to enter the “teenage years” and begin experimenting with independence. Playing outside one day, I called Gus to me and he didn’t come. So I chased. He ran. Gus ran into the street, where he was hit by a car. Fortunately, it was a slow-moving Volkswagen like ours and Gus wasn’t killed. However, he fractured a front leg. Mother paid for the surgery, and Gus recovered fully.
When he was mended, Mother made an announcement.
“I’m sending you and Gus to obedience school. If you don’t train him to come, he’ll get killed on that road.”
We started obedience classes not long after. Gus and I won all the prizes, and I was smitten with the idea of owning such a smart dog. So I began to read every book on dogs I could find.
The questions that occupied me weren’t so much about how to train dogs to do this or that. I already knew how. Rather, I wanted to know why dogs even allow themselves to be trained, and, in fact, why they seem happiest when working closely with a human. After all, dogs are closely related to wolves, and wolves are not considered to be very trainable. What, then, is it about the dog? Why do dogs want to work with us? And why do they love us?
The answers that came to me were shocking and metaphysical, way beyond the manner my normally practical brain works.
It all came back to Gus.